System updates

We’re experiencing issues that may affect your Square services. We’ll continue to update our status page with more information.

Back to Home

Sell Non-Physical Items in Square Online

Creating items in Square Online to sell non-tangible products like event tickets, services, or memberships is similar to the process of creating physical items. The main difference is that you won’t need to set a fulfillment method for these item types, but rather send an email to your customers with additional information on how to redeem their purchase.

Learn more about items and categories in Square Online.

About Non-Physical Items

Non-physical items in Square Online inlcude the following:

  • Digital: Lets you provide a digital file for download like an ebook or song. Learn more about selling digital items.

  • Donation: Allow site visitors to send donations for any cause. Learn more about how to accept donations online.

  • Membership: Collect membership dues and registration fees for clubs and classes. You can also collect them on a recurring basis. Learn more about setting up item subscriptions in Square Online. Note: The membership item type is currently only available to sellers who have already created memberships in the past. Current sellers without this item type in their catalog won't be able to create them. Improvements to the membership item will come at a later time and will be made available to more sellers in the future.

  • Event: Sell tickets to events, and include a location address and time.

  • Service: Best for services for hire such as massages and hair styling.

Create a Non-Physical Item

To add a non-physical item:

  1. From your Square Online Overview page, go to Items > Site Items.

  2. Select Create new item.

  3. In the Item Type menu, choose a non-physical item type (e.g. membership, event, service, etc.).

  4. Complete all other details (e.g. add event information) and select Save when finished.

Buyer Experience

At checkout, customers will be notified that they'll receive an email from you later with additional information. Be sure to follow up with your customers and send them any instructions or details they’ll need in order to redeem their purchase.

Note: Due to the different delivery methods for these items, they must be purchased separately from items that can be shipped, picked up, or locally delivered. By default, customers buying a non-physical item aren’t required to enter a shipping address.

Limit Non-Physical Items

If you only want to sell to customers living in your area, you can limit purchases of non-physical items to only the locations you’ve set up for shipping. To learn more about how this works, check out how to limit availability for non-physical items in Square Online.